Marilyn M. Lombardi, PhD

Brief Bio

Dr. Lombardi is Associate Professor and Director of the Center of Nursing Collaboration, Entrepreneurship, and Technology (CONCEPT) at the Duke University School of Nursing. She has a unique background that combines teaching experience, expertise in educational principles and outcomes measurement, success as a researcher, and extensive work with employing leading-edge technologies in support of educational and scholarly innovation.

In previous positions as Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) Center at Duke University, Duke University Senior IT Strategist and ISIS Senior Research Scholar, and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Scholar-in-Residence, she provided strategic perspective on national trends in academic technology, built multi-institutional coalitions, and wrote a number of white papers on transformative learning practices in higher education.

As a former associate professor of English turned Internet entrepreneur and university strategist, Marilyn has made cross-disciplinary collaboration the hallmark of her professional agenda for many years. Much of her research activity has focused on the realization of a 3D "metamedium" for deeply collaborative digital scholarship, learning and discovery based on a scalable, open-source architecture. She has also served as a member of the advisory panel for the National Endowment for the Humanities grant program in Digital Humanities Scholarship, and was awarded a planning grant from the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure and NSF Directorate for Computer & Information Science to enlist thought leaders from across the diverse human-computer interaction research community in the development of a coordinated vision and set of strategic recommendations for the future of human-computer interaction in support of 21st century discovery. In addition, she played a leadership role in a Kauffman Foundation planning initiative aimed at developing and disseminating a robust infrastructure for the assessment of learning within virtual worlds.

Her recent publications include a chapter in Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual (Springer-Verlag, 2009) as well as a contribution to the Carnegie Foundation book Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (MIT Press, 2008). A former associate professor of English, she is also the author of a book, The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics; an edited volume, Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender; and numerous articles in scholarly publications.

Academic Program Affiliations

Master of Science in Nursing Program
Doctor of Nursing Practice Program

Education

PhD

University of California, Los Angeles

MA

University of California, Los Angeles

Research Interests

Research interests include:
● Human-computer interaction, specifically human-centered computing
● Educational technology, with emphasis on the strategic use of information technology in support of teaching and learning)
● Cyberinfrastructure for teaching, learning, and assessment
● Emerging collaboration technologies, with emphasis on virtual worlds and simulation-based learning technologies for teaching and learning

1990 -- May, M. Publish and perish: William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and the public appetite for scandal. Papers on Language and Literature. 1990; 26(2); 489-512

Grant Funding (selected)

Implementing a Continuous Healthcare Innovation & Entrepreneurship Framework (CHIEF) for Academic Medical Centers
The Marcus Foundation
06/2014-05/2016Project Goal: This project addresses the lack of an effective way for academic medical centers, in particular, to measure their present capabilities for supporting and accelerating continuous healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship (CHIE), or benchmark their present capability level against that of other, similar institutions. In the absence of an evidence-based index of skills and attributes directly associated with organizational capability in the area of HIE, there are deficiencies in the direct and timely flow of ideas through the four primary innovation processes – i.e. discovery, design/define, development, and deployment. These processes determine the rate at which organizations produce both incremental innovations and revenue- or equity-generating opportunities (i.e. “deal flow”). This study will adapt conceptual frameworks and indices that are well established within manufacturing and software engineering industries (“Process Capability Models” also known as “Process Maturity Models”) for use in the healthcare industry. The specific aims of the project are as follows: Aim 1 – conceptualize a multi-level Process Capability Model (CM) as an instrument for measuring organizational healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship (HIE) capability; Aim 2 – evaluate the content validity of the instrument through expert assessment; and Aim 3 – test the instrument’s reliability and construct validity through analysis of Emory Healthcare System survey data. Data acquired will be used toward a grant proposal for a larger, multi-site trial implementation of this model for organizational HIE quality improvement. The overall significance of this research plan is to increase the understanding and further development of HIE support mechanisms capable of accelerating the deal flow process within academic medical centers.

Learning Outcomes Assessment Infrastructure for Immersive Education
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Kauffman Award 0-401-3127
08/2008-11/2009
Role: PIProject Goal: This grant supported a collaboration among software architects, learning scientists, and psychometricians, resulting in the technical specifications for a scalable infrastructure capable of tracking student performance individually and longitudinally and preserving that data in a standardized format for easy and efficient analysis. The web-services architecture recommended would make it possible for educators and researchers to assess student achievement across multiple immersive learning experiences, including complex, problem-based scenarios built on proprietary and open-source gaming and virtual worlds platforms.

NSF Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction for 21st Century Discovery
National Science Foundation
0817173
04/2008-12/2008
Role: PIProject Goal: Jointly sponsored by the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) and the Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate, this grant supported a two-day, invitation-only workshop bringing together a select group of thought leaders from industry and the academy in the fields of computer science, engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, the cognitive sciences, perceptual psychology, neurobiology, architecture and design to develop recommendations for funding priorities in human-computer interaction research over the next decade.